Buried by His Past

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Kevin McCrary, a Manhattan hoarder, is running out of space and time. After receiving a final notice of eviction, he is trying to save what he can from a 30-year build-up of "trash" and "treasure."Published OnMarch 7, 2014CreditCreditRichard Perry/The New York Times

Kevin McCrary stood just inside the doorway of his Upper East Side apartment the other day, looking at photographs.

The apartment, a railroad-style one-bedroom in an otherwise tidy walk-up building on East 65th Street, no longer resembled a place where a person might live. Over the years Mr. McCrary, 65, has packed it, floor to ceiling, with stuff: old electrical appliances, computers, stereos, books, clothing, board games, stacked furniture and more television sets than a sports bar. At times, he has slept on the street because he could not get in.

Now, with the threat of eviction hanging over his head — a city marshal is scheduled to padlock the place on March 14 and any remaining belongings will be carted away — Mr. McCrary was making one last attempt to empty it.

So far, he’d been able to excavate a small patch of space near the doorway and, in the process, had uncovered relics from his privileged childhood as the younger son of Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, the glamorous radio and television personalities who were pioneers of the radio and television talk show.

A TV crew recorded his birth, he said, and as an infant he posed with his mother for the cover of Look magazine. He pulled out from the mess a copy of the issue, followed by autographed pictures and letters to his father from the likes of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan.

Here was a photo of Bob Hope sitting with a much younger Kevin and his mother in the McCrary living room. There he was with his godparents: the statesman Bernard M. Baruch and the actress Mary Martin, of “Peter Pan” fame.

At Mr. McCrary’s feet, by the door, were old cans of food, knobs, a bathroom-sink fixture, a tube of toothpaste, an old bottle of liqueur. There were pieces that he claims are part of the World Trade Center, gathered during the months he volunteered at ground zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In some areas of the apartment, the junk was sorted into shelves and containers; in others, it had just settled into huge drifts.

Gazing at it now, he said, “This doesn’t resemble the lifestyle I was accustomed to in my earlier life.”

The earliest parts of that life were spent at Greentree, the 400-acre Long Island estate of a family friend, the wealthy investor John Hay Whitney, who was known as Jock. Mr. McCrary — whose middle name is Jock — and his older brother, John, would be left there during the week, while their parents stayed in Manhattan. Their sometimes imperfect caretakers at the mansion, Mr. McCrary said, “might have been a contributing factor to my eccentricities.”

The estate “was like Central Park,” he said, with a farm, a movie theater and huge greenhouses.

And in some ways his boyhood days were idyllic — roaming the Whitney mansion, riding Thoroughbreds in Mr. Whitney’s stables and meeting the many celebrity guests, including Fred Astaire. But having famous parents was “a double-edged sword,” he said, adding that “they were full-time celebrities and part-time parents.”

There was also the daunting notion of having to live up to the reputation of his father, a newspaper editor and columnist who served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and was one of the first Americans to view the ruins of Hiroshima. Tex was also an influential public relations man and political strategist who helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president, and Mr. Whitney to purchase The New York Herald Tribune.

Jinx Falkenburg had been an actress and model who had appeared on Broadway and was considered one of the most beautiful women in America.

In their prime in the 1950s, Tex and Jinx, as they were widely known, had two radio shows, a five-day-a-week television show, and a syndicated newspaper column. They broadcast some of their shows from Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria, where they interviewed guests as glamorous as they were.

Tex McCrary had gone to Exeter and then Yale, where he’d been a member of Skull and Bones. Kevin McCrary’s trajectory was somewhat different. After being “shipped off” to Culver Military Academy in Indiana, he said, he developed an aversion to a military career, and became disillusioned by the Vietnam War.

He attended the University of Denver, where he studied filmmaking, and then headed to San Francisco to document antiwar rallies. He joined the hippie movement, experimenting with psychedelics, attending concerts, studying yoga and traveling with girlfriends.

His working career included stints as a photographer and, in the 1980s, as an investment banker.

Thirty years ago, he moved into his rent-stabilized apartment, paying $500 a month. The rent now is $1,386 and is paid by a family trust controlled by his brother, with whom Mr. McCrary said he has a strained relationship. (John McCrary, known as Paddy, did not return calls seeking comment.)

“My whole life, I’ve been a collector — whether it was stamps or coins, baseball cards or toy trains,” said Mr. McCrary, who in the late 1990s began collecting and redeeming scrap metal for money, and using the apartment for supposedly temporary storage.

The collecting intensified after Sept. 11. He spent months at ground zero as a volunteer, collecting food and running aid stations for workers, as well as salvaging artifacts and taking photographs.

Then Mr. McCrary’s parents died within weeks of each other in early 2003. Slowly, the apartment began to fill up.

“You know the old story: If you want to cook a frog in a pot, you turn up the heat slowly so he won’t jump out,” he said, picking through the pile in the apartment. “Well, I never jumped out.”

His intention was to sell the collected items online, he said, but the selling part proved more difficult than the collecting.

“It was an extremely flawed business model,” he said, looking at the mess.

Mr. McCrary packed the place so densely, including the kitchen and bathroom, that in recent years he could not open his own door to enter.

So he began sleeping on the street. He got into the apartment by climbing four flights up the fire escape, leaning in the window to feed the herd of cats that prowled amid the hoard, often on top of it near the ceiling.

Sometimes he wound up getting injured when he ventured in, including dislocating his knee after being temporarily trapped by collapsed items, he said.

Management has begun eviction proceedings three times in recent years, but relented each time after reassurances from Mr. McCrary that he would bring things under control, said Jeffrey Weber, the managing agent for the building. “We enjoy eccentric people, and I think that’s what makes Manhattan unique,” he said. “But it’s unfortunate that his uniqueness is troubling other neighbors and is a fire hazard, and that’s the only reason why we’re doing what we have to do.”

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The actress and model Jinx Falkenburg, Kevin's mother. She died in 2003.

Three tenants have recently moved out because of the odor from Mr. McCrary’s apartment, which, Mr. Weber said, “in the summer brings tears to your eyes, literally.”

Last year, Mr. McCrary entered into a buyout agreement with the building management, which agreed to pay him roughly $20,000 in cash and excused rent if he vacated by the end of last November.

“We’ve given him ample opportunity to move,” said Mr. Weber, adding that the landlord had already spent about $30,000 in fees trying to oust Mr. McCrary.

“Because of his — I’ll call it an illness — his apartment is now filled,” Mr. Weber said. If Mr. McCrary can empty the apartment by Friday, he will collect a $12,000 cash buyout, Mr. Weber said, though he doubted that Mr. McCrary would be able to change.

“He has a mental disease, and wherever he goes he will fill up that space,” Mr. Weber said.

This is not Mr. McCrary’s first attempt to clean out his apartment.

In 2011, he appeared on an episode of the A&E TV show “Hoarders.” A large team of workers removed eight truckloads from the apartment, creating trench-like walkways, but they really only put a dent in the collection. Mr. McCrary’s insistence upon managing the removal of items wound up slowing, and ultimately halting, the operation.

Within months, he was on his way to filling the apartment up again.

Two weeks ago, Mr. McCrary called in a conventional moving company, but when they saw the most fetid sections of the apartment, they refused to take the job. So he assembled his own staff of local acquaintances, some of them homeless.

He pays them a meager wage to carry items down four flights, to leave as trash on the sidewalk or load into a rented van to bring to the eight storage units Mr. McCrary has rented in Queens. He is wary of storage sites, he said, because a Manhattan storage company evicted him several years ago and quickly auctioned off a sizable collection of his parents’ memorabilia.

His efforts have become a weird kind of street theater on the block, which is in one of the city’s priciest ZIP codes. In the apartment, Mr. McCrary painstakingly sifts through his possessions while workers wait around for the next load. Neighbors and bewildered tourists renting rooms in the building through the website Airbnb watch the halting progress.

Brooke Johnson, 32, has lived on the floor above Mr. McCrary for nine years and has watched the situation — the bug infestation, the smell and the clutter — worsen.

Walking up the stairs past his apartment with her newborn daughter and two dogs, she said she did not resent Mr. McCrary for his hoarding, but, “it’s just unfortunate that it’s so pervasive and affects others in the building.”

Mr. McCrary called it agonizing to abruptly reverse more than a decade of daily compulsive collecting, and race against the clock to meet the buyout deadline. But this is how desperately he needs the buyout money, which is crucial to renting his next place, and paying off his lawyer and storage fees, he said.

“If he’s able to do it, I’d be thrilled for him,” Mr. Weber said.

But still Mr. McCrary cannot stop collecting. While picking up a rental van recently, he grabbed a Dell computer and a Magnavox television out of the trash.

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Tex McCrary, the father of Kevin, helped popularize the talk-show format on radio and television with his wife in the 1940s and '50s. He died in 2003.

“For every two bags he takes out, he brings one back in,” said Jim Markaj, the building superintendent. “He’s a good man but he’s giving the whole building problems. In the daytime, he throws it out, and at night he brings it back up.”

Appearing on “Hoarders” only increased Mr. McCrary’s local renown and burnished his reputation as the trust fund pack rat, a neighborhood fixture who collects in plain sight. On Tuesday, when he stopped by the local library branch with his trash-picked laptop in order to connect to the Internet, he ran into another hoarder who lives on his block, a woman named Dolores, who would not give her last name.

She showed off a smart-looking handbag she had found in the trash. She nodded toward Mr. McCrary and said, “We come from a time when you just don’t throw anything out.”

Mr. McCrary boasts of finding most of his meals by scrounging discarded, unopened food from local stores and stowing it away in suitcases in clandestine spots on the block.

“I’m New York’s first freegan,” he said on a recent afternoon, as he stopped for a typical lunch break on the sidewalk, emptying a small jar of caviar into his mouth, then a cup of yogurt.

Mr. McCrary has a beat-up Ford van that he keeps parked in front of the building, jockeying it back and forth across the street as parking rules require.

The van is also packed solid with belongings, including a pile on the roof covered by a tarp. It requires a minor excavation just to squeeze behind the wheel to move the van twice a week .

Recently, after a worker angrily quit over a payment dispute, Mr. McCrary awoke the next day to find two of his van’s tires punctured. Within hours, he was hit with a parking ticket for not moving the disabled vehicle for the street sweeper. So the apartment clean-out remained on hold while he traveled to Brooklyn to hunt down a set of used replacement tires.

Mr. McCrary’s lawyer, Susan Warnock, called Mr. McCrary her “trustafarian” client, and said his initiative to remove himself from his apartment was unique.

“What’s unusual for a hoarder is that Kevin actually wants to leave,” she said.

One sticking point in the negotiations over the years has been Mr. McCrary’s cats, which have created a strong smell. He gave away six younger cats for adoption and has five remaining, which he will not part with.

“I’m married to my cats,” he said. “They’re the only family I have left.”

Which raises the question of where he would go. With limited funds, five cats and a history as a hoarder, he has not had success finding another apartment.

Lately, he has removed enough stuff to squeeze inside the door and spend nights on a makeshift loft a couple of feet beneath the ceiling. On Tuesday evening, he had removed layer upon layer of items and had made it down to “middle earth,” he joked. Suddenly he found a paper bag that contained an old ponytail he had cut off back in — well, when exactly was it?

“Well, I found it next to some phone books from 2003,” he said.

Progress is so slow, he acknowledges that he may not meet the buyout deadline.

“Based on my track record, it would appear that way now, but we’ll see,” he said. “My only other option is to curl up in a ball and give up.”

Correction:

An article in some editions last Sunday about Kevin McCrary, a hoarder on the Upper East Side who is trying to clear out his belongings, misstated the month by which he originally agreed to move out of his apartment. It was the end of November 2013, not October.